Harvard and MIT Scientists Warn That James Webb Data May Not Be What It Seems

What if we told you that the telescope isn't telling the whole truth?

It's not quite the stuff of meme fodder, but as a new study out of Harvard and MIT warns, there may be a glaring error in the models currently used by astronomy that could leave a lot of the scope's exoplanet data open to serious misinterpretation.

According to a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, the way scientists interpret the data may not be up to par.

MIT planetary science graduate student Prajwal Nira was one of the researchers who determined that the current best opacity model is not up to par.

The telescope's discrepancies are explained by the fact that there is a scientifically significant difference between a compound like water being present at 5 percent versus 25 percent.

According to de Wit, the model that scientists are currently using on data from the Hubble Space Telescope is doing well. Important data like the makeup of planets' atmospheres needs to be updated to be more accurate.

The assistant professor said that the translation process would prevent them from catching important subtleties, such as those making the difference between a planet being a good place to live or a bad place to live.

To get to that bold warning, the researchers fed eight mocked-up collections of planetary data to the sameRosetta Stone to see how accurate its translation was. According to the MIT announcement, the model produced wide-ranging predictions for the properties of a planet's atmosphere, and upon hitting an "accuracy wall" would be unable to differentiate between a planet that burns double the heat of 600 and a planet that is 300Kelvin.

The graduate student who worked on the study said there was so much that could be done. "As soon as we move to different types of atmospheres, things change, and that's a lot of data, with increasing quality, that we risk misinterpreting."

Astronomers may misinterpret planetary signals in the data.

Scientists are confused because James is seeing stuff that shouldn't be there.